Lost and Found
by jyorraku
Summary: The world ends and people are lost.


**A/N:** A random one-shot each day until Nikita's all new. (Posted Wednesday 1/19 on DW)

**Title: **Lost and Found

**Author:** jyorraku

**Rating: **PG-13

**Fandom: **Nikita, Terminator (Setting)

**Category:** Angst/Romance/Friendship

**Characters:** Michael/Nikita, Alex, Birkhoff (Sort of)

**Disclaimer:** Not mine.

**Summary:** The world ends and people are lost.

It literally takes the end of the world to get them together again. And then some.

When Judgment Day came, Division was just another bunker. Friends and enemies were just humans, running against the machines, trying to survive another day.

When the streets are littered with bleached skulls and the sky is strewn with colors never found in nature, no one cares about dead fiancés, wives and daughters, or fathers and mothers. Because the dead outnumbers the living and most people stop counting after ten fingers and toes.

It takes Nikita more than a year, evading HK-Aerials and squadrons of patrolling Terminators in every direction. But she keeps at it. After following Alex's haphazard breadcrumbs, words on paper scraps that sounded more and more like they were talking to a ghost, and zigzagging across half of what used to be the United States, she finds them.

Michael looks like parts of him have been through a meat grinder. His left arm is at an unnatural angle and his shoulder appears to be bleeding. Alex is patching him up, but clumsily as if she's trying to feel where the wound is. When she turns around to find some bandages and trips sideways, and Michael catches her from hitting the ground with his bad arm, cold sweat beading at his temples.

Alex moves awkwardly away from him, her face as still as stone. When she gets far enough, her arms are spread wide about her, palms down, touching the terrain beneath her feet. It's then that Nikita realizes that she's blind. Alex stands gingerly and places her hand on the obvious swell on her stomach. And pregnant.

Alex stares emptily at Michael, who tries to keep silent but can't help but hiss at the pain in his shoulder. Her chest starts to heave but her words are clear.

"You need to go without me."

Michael says nothing and tries to bandage himself without much success.

"Do you hear me?" Her voice raises an octave.

He quickly surveys the perimeter and says, "Be quiet."

But Alex isn't done. "Why are you doing this? Because I remind you of her? I'm NOT Nikita. I'm blind and pregnant and one of these days I'm going to get you killed. John fucking Connor himself would probably tell you to leave me behind."

Michael knows from experience that Alex isn't going to stop so he tells her, "I know you're not her." He stops and looks at her, though he knows she can't see him. "You're the family she never had. I know what it's like to lose…family. I won't let her feel that if I can help it."

Alex thinks Michael's out of his mind and makes her next words as biting as she can. "She doesn't care if you're looking after me." She takes a giant breath and blinks away the tears forming behind her unfocused eyes. "She's dead, Michael."

"Yet you keep writing to her." He's seen the scribbles she makes on packaging cardboard, wayward 8 ½ x 11 office paper, anything that's flat and takes to a writing instrument.

"You always stop long enough for me to do it," she snaps.

He smiles to himself. "I do, don't I?"

Maybe he is going crazy. When they finally get to Connor HQ, the man himself will take one look at him and write him off. A man who keeps thinking the woman he'd been ordered to kill for the last year and a half before J-Day will magically rise out of the rumble, follow them halfway across the country on paper thin directions, and be so happy he's save mother and baby that she'll stick around to bandage him when he's wounded, kiss him better when he's worse, and shoot a Metal square in the eye when he's ready to lob a hot grenade, is probably off his rocker.

The thing is, Percy notwithstanding, Michael knows a good leader when he sees one. Someone who can show what's left of the human race that they don't have to fight until they can't. They need to fight until they don't have to. Michael feels it in his bones when the man speaks through the shortwave. Connor doesn't plan to fight until the last one standing, he has a plan to save the people. And Alex needs to be one of those people.

But there's no way Alex can survive out here, especially if he's incapacitated, unless they keep moving and reach Connor's territories.

Alex senses Michael's not going to back down. She slumps down a wall. Her lip quivers and she says with a tiny voice, "She said if I ever have a kid, she gets first dibs on godmother."

Michael kneels in front of her, though numerous bruised muscles and aching bones protest. "She will love him or her, wherever she is," he says, his smile a little lost. But he gamely pats Alex gently on her shoulder before leaning over to speak to her belly. "Even if you do have a little Birkhoff in you."

He closes his eyes and rests, just a bit, in Alex's maternal halo.

"She will love you."

Nikita wipes away the steady stream of tears from her face as she walks up to them. She hugs them into stunned speechlessness.

"Yes, I will."


End file.
